Manifold | Emre Ağanoğlu

Fata Morgana

The Six Elements Air Is Made of: Heat
Fata Morgana

My happening upon Jim Dwyer’s Where the Wild Books Are, this plain yet comprehensive guide to Ecofiction, was one of the favourable coincidences that befell me in those days when the present text began to materialise on the page. As I took a closer look at the works Dwyer mentioned, I noticed that an overwhelming majority of them involved characters whose consistency did not reach much beyond that of mere bit players in the plot. As it appears, we conjecture that days strictly limited to attempting to survive await us ahead of the Anthropocene era. What this entails is the relinquishment of humankind’s future to the planet’s past: when the heat of the womb, which nurtures nestling needs as well as hell depictions, renders the world utterly uninhabitable, it seems safe to assume that humankind will no longer be able to grasp new Notes from Underground or Anna Kareninas. At least that is how we view it.

And yet we, as a species, love to fly towards the fire, and in full knowledge that those who head in the direction of the flames, prompted by the injunction of the flesh as it seeps through the cracks of either the freezing cold or loneliness until abrading the mind, will hear nothing but the scribble of their own pen, whose ascendancy will only deepen the more it vanishes. I – in full awareness of how corny an expression flying towards death is – have touched on flying towards the fire: a mere finger away from non-existence, in-between the state assumed by lust when under the guise of love and the poisons that melt the mind upon reaching the stage where the aimed harbour rests, towards the only story the first person singular will never be able to tell, most probably because not a single particle of it remains unfiddled with, towards death. After all, drawing an inflexible frame, encasing the non-existent, is enough to allow the realm of imagination to take over the truth; at least, ever since the age of discoveries, we know that imagination will measure up to the sturdiest blindfolds of whatever, somewhere between Borges’ Tlön and those who blow their own conceit into the unidentified gaps that appear on map, we might associate with dreams and nightmares.

Quite obviously, I followed in Coleridge’s and Poe’s footsteps in my leap towards the polar regions; yet, the logbooks of the very first explorers who ever ran the risk of attaining these parts, whose ontological hawsers stand unfastened, are of such a nature that makes the writings of both formidable creators superfluous. It is one thing that the spotless white canvas that extends before them render master sailors incapable of seeing anything, but it sends an even scarier chill down their spines when the readers of those pages realise that their depicting skills fail them as soon as they pick up their pen. With sheer astonishment, the explorers realise thatthey cannot describe. It seems as though this foreign canvas, which weather conditions have transmuted into a single-dimensional plane, has dumbfounded their languages, and made them cross paths with the despair felt by the workers of the Tower of Babel. Eventually, they give up, and resolve to draw, at the very least, whatever their eyes can pick up. Yet the end result remains unchanged: those patterns, oscillating between the prospect of conquering the page and that of sheer erasure, amount to nothing but compositions whose contours remain unresolved. Rembrandt’s effort to bring the lines in his winter landscapes to the brink of invisibility was obviously nowhere near accidental: he had perceived how the cold cannot support a story.

In the fourth book of Pantagruel, Rabelais tells us of a ship sailing across the freezing cold. In fact, the weather is so cold that words freeze in mid-air, becoming a mere cluster of letters, beyond Language. Pantagruel scatters these incomprehensible syllables by the handfuls across the deck. Just as Rembrandt did, Rabelais, too, had reached the confines of stories.

We owe the great master painter’s canvases to the Dutch Golden Age; as for the fact that both this period and the expeditions attempted by Dutch sailors towards the polar regions coincided with the Little Ice Age, it is one of those twists of fate that stand in utter defiance of the non-causality of co-occurrences. The fact that the Netherlands ran into some of the coldest winters in its history during Vermeer’s and Bruegel’s times led these artists to convey the conditions they experienced in their works. Each of Hendrick Avercamp’s compositions, most particularly, constitutes an invaluable resource, worthy of meticulous scrutiny for anyone who wishes to observe how freezing colds affect daily life. In his canvases, the whiteness that extends, almost monochromatic, free of any notches that would guide the mind, until the horizon, entirely rebuilds the space anew. And this despite the many merriments the cold weather brings. It is as if he were not standing somewhere in the town or city he had known ever since his childhood, but amid the raw terrain consisting of nothing but whiteness. The unprecedented cold weather seems as though to have trapped him in an intermediate zone, bereft of time, that would have lost its spatial nature.

Despite my own being rather used to carving out bits of absence that are of no use to me in order to attain the text I intend, I myself am puzzled by the emptiness in those paintings. Sometimes carefully pondering every word, sometimes laying down the lines as fast as if I had been in a trance, with each new draft, I scrape off those bits of sentences that strike me as conspicuous from where they stand and mend them back together with the help of my pen. The fact that viewers, looking over from the indifference of the world, should notice my own failure to find a shore where my mind would find respite does not bring me solace; I want them to be fulfilled by the mirages which they see, knowing full well that no one owes me, or us, attention to our adventures.

After all, every Lost Son is a bit player of his own past, so he may choose, among all those available, a starring role of his liking within the present of all others, and, in a sense, re-enact these myriad irreparable sacrifices. This forms a sort of Flying Dutchman drill: the incarnation of minds that have become accomplished masters at inflicting pain without causing harm. Despite how ill-fitted to the category of pure coincidences the fact that this mythical ghost ship should share practically the same age as both Avercamp's paintings and the Dutch expeditions to the North Pole is, it should not have been too difficult for the image of the sailor, doomed to remain forever divested of a harbour, to have spread by word of mouth at the time: we are in the age of discoveries. Back then, the sight of a ship travelling beyond – according to the observer – the horizon line, the consequence of a trick of the atmosphere known as Fata Morgana, probably gave most sailors quite a startle. Notwithstanding their extensive experience.

On the flip side, for invisible sailors, to be incarnated in words, a change in temperature is essential. Particularly cold conditions must occur at the poles, and hot ones in the deserts. The formal definition of Fata Morgana is, as should be expected, rather prosaic: an optical illusion, occurring where an atmospheric duct is formed, due to the bending of rays from a steep thermal inversion through layers of air at different temperatures. I can appreciate the simplicity that underpins this sentence, without a doubt, yet my eyes won’t give up looking for the Flying Dutchman amid those layers mimicking refractive lenses.

Sure enough, this invisible ship eventually leapt ashore from the language of sailors, and landed up in literature; once on Thomas Moore’s and Coleridge’s looms, its nature progressively shifted. And when Wagner eventually borrowed it from Heine, the curse of the Flying Dutchman ended up intertwined with the theme of eternal love, the most beautiful of all promised lands. Only in death could the sacrificial victim of unconditional love finally meet the very attachment that could rescue it from the seas, to which it had been cursed.

Ultimately, for the storyteller to surface, a change in temperature is required. Because genuine affection is actually a distant and indifferent emotion that leaves the person alone with themselves.

This, we learnt from The Little Match Girl as well. In this 1845 fairy tale by Andersen, for the little girl who, despite the freezing cold, cannot return home for fear of her father, the only chance to stay warm is for her to light one of the matches that she couldn’t sell. At once, her mind starts to delude her, and in the faint light of the match, she sees, first, a hearth blazing. When she eventually gives herself up entirely to the little feast that this deceiving source of heat provides, she will encounter death: in order to warm up her thoughts at least and revel in the spectacle of the only person who ever loved her, the only person whom she ever loved without expectations, her grandmother, she strikes all the matches in her hand at once. She will not live to see the fire go out.

The above forms such a blindfold which only the narrator can free themselves from, for I know that the name of the most ancient fire-stoking goddess, Hestia, has been largely ignored across the stories which, through the ages, have been fuelled by the very fires she tended to. Yet Hestia, one of the Twelve Olympians, is Zeus’ older sister, and one of the children whom Cronus devoured. Although her brother Zeus does save her, along with her other siblings, Hestia eventually chooses to withdraw. She never marries, keeps aloof from the quarrels opposing gods and humans, and contents herself with fulfilling her only duty: keeping the sacred flames of Mount Olympus burning.

Because for storytellers to surface, a source of heat is required.

This might be the reason why we now fear the prospect of being reduced to mere bit players in the stories that await us once the curtain of global warming is pulled on the entire planet. We assume that when this world, for now only a figment of imagination, ceases to be the playground of large corporations and money amounts and eventually turns into truth itself, everything that shall be left of us from our stories will be, at best, our wrinkled up faces, soon to be – if not already – buried in the sand. And even in case anyone listens, they will never hear Ozymandias, this bone-chilling desert poem by Shelley. They will never know that whoever replicates the arrogance of that King of Kings will be met with the same epilogue as he was: buried in the sand, reduced to bits.

The mind truly possesses a cruel sense of humour, bordering on affection. In the irreversible stages of hypothermia, by drawing erroneous conclusions from the data that reaches it, the region of the brain responsible for interpreting the temperature outside begins to genuinely believe that a scorching desert heat reigns over its surroundings. A person on the brink of freezing to death begins to sweat profusely, and then, just before expiring, even starts to undress, in an attempt to relieve their body of some of this heat.

I consider such a person as lucky, too exhausted as they are to even consider that their future will leave no memories.